fek:

I just confirmed my magazine assignments for December/January.

• Drake
• The xx
• Speech Debelle

Funny enough, the one I didn’t pitch of those three: Drake, the most epic of that list, even though I’ll be doing a phoner with him and Speech Debelle (who got stuck in London because of visa issues, and can’t make CMJ because of it).

The xx, I get to talk to sometime next week. Hip hop interviews are the best; without fail, they will almost always give you substantially less bullshit than their counterparts outside the genre. The British, too: last month, La Roux gave me a great quote about how interviews are complete bullshit (in most cases, present company included, I couldn’t agree more).

Two hip-hop interviews, one a Jew, one a Brit, and a bunch of mopey British kids who still have no idea why everyone likes them so much. This is an insanely great, great set of assignments. If you don’t know why: here’s a live set by The xx, my new favorite track on Speech’s album, and Drake throwing down new classics. There are worse positions to be in. As Nic said, it’s not like you work in a steel mill. No: I definitely don’t.

And that’s how we do it here.

…Cheaply copied reminiscences of a blurrily imagined decade are basically their own genre now, cloudy and proud. The sound has many names, but none of them seem to fit just right. Dream-beat, chillwave, glo-fi, hypnagogic pop, even hipster-gogic pop— all are imperfect phrases for describing a psychedelic music that’s generally one or all of the following: synth-based, homemade-sounding, 80s-referencing, cassette-oriented, sun-baked, laid-back, warped, hazy, emotionally distant, slightly out of focus. Washed Out. Memory Tapes. Ducktails. Ah-woo-ooh.

Say what you will about the music snobs at Pitchfork, and yeah, there’s plenty to gnaw on. But they’re still writing better music reviews than anybody else, whether you like what they’re writing about or not.